


A Treatise on the Nature of Revenge

by Masu_Trout



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Resurrection, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 06:25:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9707720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: The youngest Strife daughter finds a corpse on the slope of Mt. Nibel.It doesn't stay a corpse for long.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [surskitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/surskitty/gifts).



> I saw this pairing and just knew I had to try and write something for it--I hope that you enjoy this!

There was nothing new about the sight of men in black trudging up and down the side of Mount Nibel, ruining the beauty of the unbroken snow with their heavy boots. All sorts of odd people were making use of the mountain these days. She'd told Lockhart it was a bad idea to allow Shinra to purchase land here, but it wasn't as if he would ever listen to her. Stupid man.

Still. Something about these two set of every warning bell in her head. Shinra's Turks might be expected visitors, but normally they didn't go wandering about before the sun had even risen. And, for that matter, normally they weren't carrying a suspiciously-shaped sack between them.

She took a step back, relying on the copse of trees behind her to break up the shape of her silhouette. It was dark enough that she'd be difficult to see and she'd come from a direction that would make it tough for them to catch sight of her tracks, but you never did know with these people. Some of them used strange gear and stranger materia; some of them almost seemed more animal than human.

 _I'm not here,_ she thought, slowing her breathing and keeping herself still, _I'm a shadow, I'm a tree, I'm a stone_.

It wasn't as if she'd intended to spy on them—all she'd wanted was to get out early enough to check her traps before the scavengers could have a chance to find them—but she doubted that would matter much to these folks. Sky was the last of the Strife family, and there were an awful lot of ways a lone woman could disappear out here on an unforgiving mountain like this: hypothermia, a bad fall, disorientation. Predators.

There was a stain on the bottom of the sack, glistening black in the dim light. It looked as if it might be spreading. 

As they drew closer, the two men's voices echoed across the snowy landscape. It gave her a bit of comfort to realize that each of them sounded positively miserable.

“—and it's fucking cold, too,” the first of the two snarled. He had skin so pale it almost seemed to reflect the moonlight and white-blond hair that hung lankly about his face. He wasn't wearing any gloves. “Don't see why we couldn't have been assigned to Costa del Sol, instead, maybe get to see the sun every once in a while.”

“It's sunny enough here,” the other man said mildly, “it's just not warm.” He was the leaner of the two, with dark brown skin and black hair pulled up into a low ponytail. He'd at least thought to bring gloves—points for him on that front, at least—but the pair he was wearing looked pitifully thin and he hadn't thought to put on any sort of coat over his sharp suit. 

Quarter marks, she decided, and even that was being generous. You had to give outsiders credit for making an effort, even if that effort wouldn't do them any sort of good in actual snowstorm conditions. They were lucky it was summer.

“Don't know what the point is of having sun without heat,” the first said. “At that point, it's just taunting you, isn't it?”

The second didn't bother responding to that. Instead, he paused and looked out at the expanse of snow around them. “Where should we bury it?” he asked.

 _Not here,_ Sky begged silently. _Anywhere but here._ A copse of trees had to be a tempting spot for a corpse. She could only hope they wouldn't end up burying two bodies tonight.

“Bury it? Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how fucking awful it is to try and dig through permafrost? Let's just dump it in the snow and get back inside before we lose our toes.”

“And if the locals find it?”

The first snorted. “What are they going to do, open a criminal investigation? We _own_ this town—even if they actually cared, there's nothing they can do.”

It was miserable to hear them talk this way, and all the worse because she knew it was true. She wished for a summon or a spell to throw at them; even a low-level fire would be enough. All she needed was a channel to loose her anger through, something stronger than her bare fists and raw rage.

The second man didn't respond. She couldn't see his face, but she could only imagine he wasn't exactly convinced.

“It's basically a suicide, anyway,” the first added after another few seconds of agonizing silence. “She wanted to die, right? And she did. Nothing suspicious about that.”

“I don't know too many suicides who ended up strangled _and_ stabbed _and_ shot.”

“That just means you haven't been a Turk long enough. Now come on, help me get this free.”

The two of them struggled with the sackcloth a moment, pulling at the edges—and then, so suddenly it looked more like a magic trick than real life, a body dropped from the cloth and out onto the snow. It tumbled down the slope of the mountain for a few seconds before finally coming to a stop. 

“…There,” the first said after a moment, “that's good enough. Now come on, let's get back inside.”

The second still didn't seem quite convinced, but after another moment's pause he shrugged and began to follow his companion back towards Shinra Manor.

 _Babies_ , she thought at their retreating forms. _Can't even handle a little cold_.

If she were smart, she'd head home now. Forget she'd ever seen anything, cozy up next to her little fire and cook some of the meat she'd trapped into a nice stew. What did she care if one Shinra employee killed another? Why should she risk herself for something already dead?

But when she remembered the way that man spoke, that red-hot anger built inside her once more. _Nothing they can do_ he'd said, and—well, maybe that was true. She couldn't get Mayor Lockhart to listen to her, she couldn't bring this dead person back, and she certainly couldn't give the body in the snow any sort of justice.

There were things other than that, though. At the very least she could remember someone had been left here, without a name or a grave to carry them into the afterlife. At the very least she could close the corpse's eyes. 

That had to count for something, even if it felt like nothing at all in the face of her overwhelming helplessness. 

She went carefully down the mountainside, breaking through fresh snow with every step she took, until finally she reached the point where the body had been dumped. 

The first thing she noticed was that it was a woman's corpse. Pale skin, with brown eyes and brown hair that lay like shriveled roots in the snow around it. The labcoat the woman had worn was now stained dark red in two different places, and her neck was so torn and bloody it hardly looked like there was any skin left there. There was nothing to cover the poor corpse; the men had even taken the cloth back with them. It lay face-up in the snow, staring at a sky it couldn't see. 

No one could deserve this. Even if this woman had been a traitor, or a thief, or a monster in her own right—surely there should be more dignity in death than this.

Carefully, she knelt down in the snow, and leaned over the corpse to brush its eyes closed. The skin felt cool against hers, the eyelids almost seemed to flutter against her palm… 

And then they _did_ move, and the corpse's whole head with them, and before she could even find the breath to scream a dead woman's hands were wrapped around hers.

With a sort of bestial snarl, the not-a-corpse pulled her down into the snow. She lashed out with her hands and feet, panicked and gasping and desperately wishing she'd learned fighting rather than trapping.

“Stop,” she begged, “stop, stop, stop!” 

Sky didn't know who she was asking: the corpse to stop moving, perhaps, or the gods to stop any of this insanity from happening. 

Impossibly, though, the corpse _did_ stop. It didn't let go of her, but its hands went a little bit slack around her wrists and it no longer seemed like it wanted to throttle her quite so much.

“You're not Shinra,” the corpse—no, the woman, said—peering curiously at her.

“Obviously!” It was all she could do not to take another swing; being mistaken for _Shinra_ was just about the worst thing she could imagine topping off this nightmare morning.

“I thought…” The woman let go of her. She pressed one hand to the gash in her throat, and then her eyes widened. “I was fighting them.”

“You lost, I think. Two of them came by just a minute ago and dumped you in the snow.”

She couldn't help but stare at the woman's face. When she'd first looked down, the corpse's eyes had been unmistakeably brown. Now they were green, so bright and vivid they almost seemed to glow.

Surely none of this could really be happening. It was like the plot of some atrocious radio play.

“I can't die, then.” There was a numb sort of horror in the woman's voice.

“I'm no scientist, but I don't think it's the dying you're having a problem with. I think it's more the staying dead.”

Before the words even left her mouth she wanted to shove them back in, but the woman only laughed. “Fair enough.” There was something warm in that laughter, an honesty that transformed her from terrifying to strangely beautiful even with the ragged gash still opened in her neck. “Hello, by the way. I'm Doctor Lucrecia Crescent. Or, former doctor, anyway—I doubt my license will be valid once I'm declared officially dead.”

“Hello,” she stammered, suddenly nervous with the full force of the woman's brilliant gaze turned on her. “I'm Strife. Ah, that is, I'm _a_ Strife, not _the_ Strife, but I'm the last of the family left so unless I find myself a husband who won't complain too much about taking my name sometime soon I'll probably stay the only Strife around here.” She blushed red and snapped her mouth shut, wishing she could sink into the snow. There was an almost impressive level of incompetence required to fail at giving a stranger your name. “My given name's Sky,” she added, quieter, “but most folks just use the family name these days.”

“Strife,” Lucrecia said, drawing out the word as if she were testing the sound of it on her tongue. “A pleasure to meet you.”

“Same to you.” Hopefully. Probably. If she didn't decide to make like the corpses in the old stories and start chewing on human flesh. “Um, if you don't mind me asking..?”

“You want to know what I am.” Lucrecia frowned. “I wish I could tell you. An experiment, I suppose, or at least the unintentional side effect to one. A monster, and not just for the obvious reasons.”

“I see,” she lied.

Lucrecia was quiet a long moment. Finally, she added, “my son is down there, in the manor.”

Sky bit her lip to keep herself from saying something insensitive. It was hard to imagine this ethereal woman as a mother.

“Do I have the right to call him that?” Lucrecia wondered aloud. She seemed to be talking more to the air than to Sky, and she rather felt it would be rude to interrupt. “When I finally realized what I'd allowed—what I'd done to him—I tried to kill myself. When I realized I couldn't, I tried to kill the rest of them instead.” A humorless smile split her face. “Should've known Turks would play dirty.”

“What are you going to do?” Sky asked. A child down there, all alone, locked up in that lifeless building and snared in Shinra's web… it was awful to imagine.

“Try to find a better way to die, I suppose.”

“ _What?_ ”

Both of them flinched at the snarl that ripped its way from Sky's throat. She knew it was dangerous to speak too loudly here, but she couldn't control the way the words poured from her.

“You can't just—lose! If you go off and _die_ just like they want you to, then who will be left to stop them? Who's going to keep your son away from them?”

“What, then, you think _I_ can stop them? What sort of power do you think I have?” Her laugh was a bitter thing. “The things I've done can't be undone. The best I can do now is try to atone.”

“Death isn't atonement. It's nothing but the end.” Sky dug her fingernails into her palms, feeling the pinpricks of pain as they cut bloody crescent moons in her skin. 

She couldn't help thinking of her father, her mother, her two brothers, her sister—all the family she'd ever had or needed. Each of them had fought until their last, be it against sickness or cold or infection. Now it was only her. What would she fight for?

When she'd stumbled over to Lucrecia's corpse, it had been a rebellion. A small, useless one, a gesture that shouldn't have meant anything, but she'd found far more than she expected in it.

“There's not just one way to fight,” Sky said. “Just because you're weaker—just because _we're_ weaker—doesn't mean we can't still make them hurt.”

It was easy to reach out and bridge the gap between them. “Lucrecia,” she said, “you want to make things right. I want to make Shinra _hurt_.” She took Lucrecia's hand in hers and twined their fingers together. Her body was warmer than it had been before, but it still felt far from alive. “Would you like to see what we can do together?”

Her breath caught in her throat as she watched Lucrecia stare at her. Instinctively, she knew she would only ever get one chance at something like this.

“Strife, you said? You certainly live up to the name.” Lucrecia smiled. It wasn't the kind expression she'd seen before or the bleak and bitter one she'd worn when she talked about her child. This one promised pain. “Well, then, Miss Strife. Let's see what we can do.”

She pulled their twined hands closer and gently pressed her bloodied and cracked lips to the back of Sky's hand. The press of the kiss was cold against her skin—it felt like a promise.

It felt like the beginning of something.

–

Three weeks later, a young woman applied for a position as a cleaning woman down at Shinra Manor. She was the last of her family, she said, unable to fend for herself on the unforgiving mountain and desperately in need of work. Her literacy and her critical thinking tested poorly, but it wasn't as if they needed an _intelligent_ maid. Her work ethic was solid and she didn't ask too many questions; the important skills were all there.

And if she sometimes stared too long at the labels on the gleaming rows of test tubes, or if she occasionally seemed to be listening on the scientists' conversations—well, what of it? Any backwater townsperson would be at least a little curious about the great company's doings.

There was nothing suspicious about it at all.


End file.
